Neurotheology: Virtual Religion in the 21st Century - Softcover

McKinney, Laurence O.

9780945724018: Neurotheology: Virtual Religion in the 21st Century

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0945724012 ISBN 13: 9780945724018

Publisher: Amer Inst for Mindfulness, 1994

The most lively, readable and authoritative work on the interface between mind science and religion, Neurotheology: Virtual Religion in the 21st Century has become the classic in its field, a standard by which others are measured.

Teachers, scientists, students, and readers worldwide have found answers they wanted to basic riddles we all face. McKinney’s ability to trace the basis and evolution of religious and metaphysical practice with modern brain scanning technology has been praised by experts in every field including leading Christian theologian Harvey Cox, the Dalai Lama, and visionary writer Arthur C. Clarke.

What will we actually experience at death? Why do all religions let us escape hell? Why does God act like your father, and not your friend’s father? Why do we get that tunnel of light? How do athletic training and sincere religious practice both alter the mind in positive ways? Exactly how did we become "human"? What were we thinking between conception and birth? When did we first notice time?

Be prepared to marvel at how the brain manages our world from moment to moment as it weaves the tapestry of consciousness. Then be prepared to relax when you finally learn why "heaven" in any religion is not only likely, but nearly impossible to avoid for reasons quite acceptable to modern science.

The Harvard-educated author skillfully re-examines cutting edge brain science through social and cultural context to re-examine birth, infancy, life, and death through radically new perspectives.

If you enjoy thinking but want deeper answers, this is an owner’s manual for your mind. If you are religious, but enjoy science, this is the book you’ve been searching for. Neurotheology earned honorable mention in the Writer's Magazine First Works competition and remains the classic in a growing field.

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About the Author:

Author, essayist and columnist Laurence O. McKinney has chronicled the leading edge of Western culture since the 1970s. Educated at private schools and Harvard, McKinney originally trained to be a writer, but a gift for explaining the science behind modern medicine and technology led instead to an international career in communications. His educational materials soon found their way into classrooms nationwide as well as the Army, the Navy, and the Smithsonian. In 1983, he co-founded the American Institute for Mindfulness in Boston, and began the research that led to Neurotheology. In his breakthrough work, the original book that coined the term, McKinney combined his training at the Harvard Divinity School with his lifelong study of mind science to anchor a work exploring and explaining some of the most difficult questions of human existence.

Besides his professional activities, McKinney has taught at the University of North Carolina, and has given lectures and talks at a number of institutions. Moving to Arlington, MA, a Boston suburb, in 1997, McKinney has continued to write and conduct further research. He corresponds with readers from all paths of life. His current project, an exploration of some simple differences between male and female minds and the complex problems this creates for modern humans, is slated for completion in late 2003.

It had been forever once, in such endless peace, then suddenly meeting these great powerful gods and demons who were alternately blessing us to dry-diaper-heaven, or condemning us to centuries in too-hot-bath hell. Sometimes it seemed like forever again, alone in the utter desolation of a dark, lonely room; only to be hugged back to paradise in a mother's arms. All babies are like that, al over the world. Details are merely cultural; infantile reality works the same way in every little unmyelinized infant mind. We were all little angels, sent down to earth; we were all in that fabled garden, naked and unafraid. Once upon a time God really did speak to all of us, thundering from on high. Probably about six feet high, but who's to know, standing there at one and a half with a brain only half-way up through hookup, innocent of good, evil, and what will happen if we try to feed the VCR a slice of pizza. But finally the image won't change, and the sequencing is clear. Finally, we can remember clearly, seeing ourselves in our minds in a past also sequenced for reference. We become reflective and begin to find our place in the scheme of things.

As our brains matured into memory and clear reflective thought, we began to pick up and retain both personal and cultural detail. Over a nearly endless time it happened. Our gods descended from heaven to be our mothers and fathers, while the great saints and demons took off their halos and horns to become older brothers and sisters or our aunts and uncles. Bears and monsters became dogs and dump trucks as we graduated from the collective unconscious into the present space through a place of fable and mythology given to us with our baby food. During those three years of worldly time, we are weaned from the world of our oneness and rewoven into the collective fabric of our own family and culture.

Back when days were months and months were years, we have the answers to why both Jewish patriarchs and Buddhist demigods or "devas", had such extraordinary lifespans. When we were very small, naturally "there were giants in those days", as in Bible stories and all other creation stories. The years before reflective understanding are so different because we experience them so differently. All mythologies start with a golden age; or at least a time when the gods were making sure everything was working right. It is to this early plane we descend simply by growing up. Heaven is just our infantile perception of infancy, and we were all there once.

If we try to think back to those earliest memories, we can almost scent the breeze of timelessness that beckons over that dark threshold. This is the true time warp, the undertow of trying to remember thoughts from another era, other lives, so deep and so vaguely comprehended, like fossils trapped in the very strata of our mind. We can hardly remember how long it was from age three back to age two. From two back to one is much longer; time for any number of "previous lives" as we move into our collective and universal mythical world time. There is more time on the other side of birth than we can ever remember. There is no time so endless, or so deep.

The haunting memories of those earlier times are still there, scattered and generalized through our waking perceptions still alive in our dreams and our nightmares. This is the personal and universal mind that is ours alone, and depending on how far back we go, shared with all others on this planet. The further we regress, the more general our entire consciousness becomes, the more time slurs, the more oneness in all things. The further we come forward, the greater the differentiation into all the specifics of our self in our space.

Only if the mind itself simplifies can we ever re-experience that other universe that has always been there within us. If the final maturation of our human brain forces us to forget that timeless place in order to deal with this time and space, no matter. We will rediscover it again at the right time, whenever something makes our mind simple again. It happens every time that we let go the nets of perception and find our centers, those times when time stands still. In terror and in ecstasy, the overburdened brain slips time for the moment. Then we can know things that we cannot express or even think about. It happens every time we undergo an experience so powerful that it blankets consciousness, forcing us mentally into a momentary timelessness. It happens temporarily, but only momentarily, and it keeps us aware that there is a place beyond human description. It will happen with eternal finality during death, the only experience in this lifetime that will release us from the grip of time in plenty of time to make it back to heaven, forever...before we die.

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